Why don’t we make money from Thunderbolt?

Published on 4^th February 2010 in Websites, tagged Thunderbolt.

Whenever I tell people about Thunderbolt, one of the first questions they ask is “why don’t you make money from it?”

It’s a reasonable question; last year, Thunderbolt had over 3 million page views from over 600,000 unique visitors. Sure, it’s not anywhere near the numbers that the big sites get, but it’s enough to make a few thousand pounds a year. So why don’t we?

Adverts suck

The only people that like adverts are advertisers. In almost all cases, they’re a unwanted distraction that detract from the user experience. The larger game websites like Eurogamer are plastered with adverts and it’s often overwhelming.

There’s value in more than money

As a volunteer-run website, we have the luxury of choosing how to use Thunderbolt’s popularity. We could make money directly from it using adverts, but there’s also value in not doing so.

Since the site isn’t covered in adverts, it’s more pleasant to read and this is a great incentive for people to return. The lack of adverts differentiates us from commercial sites and gives us an edge over them.

What would we do with the money?

Like any organisation, we have bills to pay and we need money to do that. While commercial sites have costs that run into the tens of thousands, Thunderbolt costs around £70 a year to run. We can easily cover that through donations and our small Amazon Associates earnings, so there’s little need for us to have adverts.

But what if we did? The most obvious thing that we could do is to employ someone full-time. If we only paid the minimum wage, this would still cost around £15,000 a year with all the legal and other overheads. With the traffic that we have right now, we would fall well short of that mark.

This gap between the amount of money that you could make and the minimum amount that is actually useful to have is sizeable. Sure, there are things that we could do with less money, but would their value be greater than the value of not running adverts and compromising our site? I don’t think so.

A matter of principle

Walt Disney once said:

“We don’t make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies.”

There are few better ways to sum up the alternate mindsets of creative work. This isn’t just a fancy but pointless quote though; the difference between websites that write articles for money and those like Thunderbolt is huge. It’s a gaping chasm. A vast gulf that’s hard to miss.

When you rely on advertisements to pay the bills, you need page views and lots of them. Before you know it, they start to influence your editorial and design decisions. Why write a thoughtful opinion piece when you could knock up a ‘top ten’ list that would get five times the traffic? Why keep articles to a single page when you can force people to click through several to read the entire article? Why research an article properly when you could write two in the same time?

If you run adverts on your website, you immediately have a fundamental conflict of interest. To make money, you have to put as many adverts on your site as possible and get those all important page views. To please your readers, you have to maintain the quality of your content and not compromise the user experience. This battle is impossible to win.

By avoiding adverts, we only have one master to please at Thunderbolt: our readers. That’s a battle we can win.